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Khamenei long obstructed peace for Israel. But his influence was waning before his assassination.
(JTA) — Six days after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini seized power in Iran on Feb. 11, 1979, he hosted his first foreign dignitary: the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Yasser Arafat.
Arafat, seen then by the Americans and the Israelis as a terrorist, was an ardent opponent of the emerging Israel-Egypt peace deal. Khomeini expelled Israeli diplomats and handed the embassy building over to the PLO.
Arafat relayed the message he got from Khomeini: After the new Islamic regime consolidated its hold over Iran it would turn to “victory of Israel.”
“Today Iran, tomorrow Palestine,” Arafat told reporters.
The symbolism was not lost on the Egyptian, Israeli and American negotiators hammering out the peace deal in Camp David: According to reports at the time, they redoubled their efforts to get to a peace deal before the new Islamist regime in Iran could scuttle it.
Keeping Iran from getting in the way of peace has been a preoccupation of Israeli and U.S. governments from then until the Israeli strike Sunday that killed Khomeini’s successor as Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, a key aim of the latest U.S.-Israel war against the country.
The regime’s hopes of stymying peace scored successes at time, particularly in the 1990s, when the terrorist group it backed, Hamas, undermined the peace process with repeated and massive terrorist attacks on Israeli targets. More recently it spectacularly backfired, when Sunni Muslim states fearful of Shia Iran’s adventurism in the region shed years of resistance to peace with Israel and forged ties under the Abraham Accords.
Iran, with its massive military capabilities, its oil wealth, its appetite for regional hegemony and its obdurate Islamism may have been the foremost obstacle to Israel’s integration into the region since 1979.
“Iran was a continually negative actor trying to prevent any normalization of Israel in the Middle East,” Joel Rubin, a former deputy assistant secretary of state during the Obama administration, said in an interview.
Khomeini had since the early 1960s cast Israel as an enemy of Islam and deplored the young Jewish state’s relationship with Iran and the monarchy he cast aside in 1979. In a landmark 1980 speech he listed four “world devourers” as the United States, communism, Israel and Zionism.
Khomeini lost little time in making good on his pledge to Arafat to seek Israel’s defeat. In 1982, after Israel invaded Lebanon, Iranian agents cultivated ties among fellow Shia who resented Israel’s presence. Within a year, Hezbollah was established, becoming one of Israel’s most implacable enemies.
Working with Iran, Hezbollah delivered some of the bloodiest attacks on Israelis and on Jews in the subsequent decades, among them the bombing of Israel’s embassy in Buenos Aires in March 1992, killing 29, and then the bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in the same city in 1994, killing 85 people, the deadliest attack in Argentine history.
“May this news bring relief to the families and contribute to the acknowledgment of responsibility and to the fight against terrorism and impunity,” the pro-Israel Argentine government said Sunday after Khamenei’s assassination was confirmed.
The timing of the Argentina attacks was not coincidental: The George H.W. Bush administration had in 1991 convened talks in Madrid, bringing around the table for the first time Israel and most of the Arab states in the region. Two years later, Israel and the Palestinians, under the aegis of the Clinton administration, launched the Oslo peace talks.
Arafat by then had done a famous 180-degree turn, embracing peace with Israel and appearing with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on the White House lawn. Iran, wary of Arafat since he first expressed openness to peace talks in 1988, had begun to cultivate ties with Hamas, the Islamist group that rejected any accommodation with Israel.
By 1994, Iran’s support for Hamas, according to officials of Arafat’s Palestinian Authority, was in the tens of millions of dollars. The money funded terrorist attacks that undermined Israeli confidence in the peace process, propelling Oslo skeptic Benjamin Netanyahu to the prime ministership in 1996. The attacks included suicide missions — a method that Hamas operatives had learned from Hezbollah trainers in Lebanon.
Oslo petered out in the late 1990s and then exploded into the Second Intifada in late 2000. In 2006, when it appeared that the second Bush administration was making strides in getting the Israelis and the Palestinians back to the table, Hezbollah, backed by Iran, launched a war against Israel.
Khamenei, who succeeded Khomeini in 1989, only intensified the country’s focus on confronting Israel, spending billions of dollars on terrorist proxies including Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthi militias and investing in his own Islamic Revolutionary Guard Forces and its Quds Force, which both trains proxies and conducts its own operations abroad.
Khamenei periodically posted on social media his “plan for the elimination of Israel.” When Arafat died in 2004, Khamenei reviled him as “a traitor and a fool.”
Khamenei’s hostility to Israel was ideological: He would periodically deride Arab and Palestinian leaders who said the conflict should be left primarily to the Palestinians to resolve. Palestine was an “issue for the Islamic world,” he said.
“Khamenei was critical” to obstructing peace with Israel, said Trita Parsi, an Iranian-born analyst who is the executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. “There were others in the system that were more amenable to the idea of adopting a more flexible position on Israel in order to resolve their problems with the United States.”
Confronting Israel was also a means of stemming U.S. influence in the region. A key rationale for U.S. and Israeli peacemaking in the 1990s was to placate other conflicts and focus on Iran.
“The view was that Iran was the bigger threat, and so for Israel’s peace camp it was, ‘Let’s get over the Palestinian issue, to consolidate support in the Arab world, to enable us to deal with that bigger Iranian threat,’” Rubin said.
Matt Duss, the executive vice president at the Center for International Policy and a former foreign policy adviser to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, the progressive leader, said Iran was able to exploit resentment against American and Israeli influence in the region because at times the influence was itself toxic.
“Iran supported terrorist groups that supported violence against civilians, horrific violence, both against its own people and people in the region and elsewhere,” he said. “Iran clearly exploited anger at both Israel and the United States for its own political ends. It did not invent that opposition. It did not invent those grievances. It successfully exploited and weaponized them.”
Parsi, too, noted that Iran did not operate in a vacuum: It at times exploited existing tensions stoked by Israeli actions.
“If there wasn’t a problem at the outset, there’s no way for an outside power to be able to take advantage of it and be able to push for it, and we’ve seen that as long as the situation on the ground between Israel and Palestine remains what it is, and you have more settlements being built and disregard for international law,” he said.
Iran was influential but not instrumental in inhibiting peace, said Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and a top Middle East peace negotiator in Republican and Democratic administrations.
Iran looked askance at Israeli talks with Iran’s ally, Syria, in the 1990s, but ultimately it was Syrian President Hafez Assad’s obduracy that scuttled those talks, Miller said.
“The major determinant was the inability, in my judgment, of Assad to understand that if he wanted more than Sadat got, he would have to give at least as much as Sadat got,” Miller said, referring to Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian president assassinated in 1981 for making peace with Israel.
“Assad was not willing to do nearly as much on the issue of personal diplomacy, public diplomacy, as what Sadat did,” Miller continued. So, no, Iran was not the major constraint or the major reason why we don’t have an Israeli-Syrian agreement.”
Iranian backing, training and funding for terrorist attacks inhibited popular support for peace, said Shira Efron, the Pentagon-aligned RAND Institute’s Israel policy chair.
“It was tangible in the sense that you see Iran’s different ways of altering the security situation” with terrorist attacks. Iran’s hand and this was always their plan,” she said. “Khamenei was talking about it, this idea of creating the ‘ring of fire’ around Israel — it originated in Tehran.”
The “ring of fire” — the threat to Israel composed of militias in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and as far afield as Yemen and Iraq — was the construct that Hamas hoped would trigger a massive multi-front war when its terrorists raided Israel on Oct. 7, launching the conflict that culminated this weekend with the U.S.-Israel attacks on Iran.
Khamenei hoped that the ring of fire would prevail in a looming conflict with the United States, tweeting just weeks before his death, “The Americans should know if they start a war, this time it will be a regional war.”
But Israel and the United States launched the current war without fear of igniting the region, in part because of the Abraham Accords, the normalization agreements with Arab countries near Iran. Those accords came about in part because those countries saw working with Israel and the United States as the most effective means of stemming Iran’s hostile adventurism.
Some of those countries are now reaping consequences of allying with Israel, taking blows from Iranian missiles and drones. Some are emphasizing that they reserve the right to join the fight against Iran.
“Look at the proximity between the Islamic Republic of Iran and key Gulf states which have either made peace with Israel or want to,” Miller said. “How could anybody in their right mind argue that Iran has been the major constraint, or even a constraint?”
Iran’s regime, Rubin said, was ultimately the author of its own diminishment. “Imagine Iran had said, ‘We’re going to back peace. We’re going to respect the Palestinians whatever they decide. We’re not going to undermine their politics. We’re not going to support Hamas in the case that they blow up Israelis and kill Palestinians who talk to the Israelis. We’re going to actually be a constructive player.’”
With Khamenei assassinated, the question is whether Iran’s future leadership might take more of that approach. That’s the hope of the United States and Israel, which have urged the Iranian people to take hold of their destinies following the war. But the Islamic Republic swears that it is strong and has said it would name a successor to Khamenei imminently. According to reports that emerged after his death, the CIA has assessed that it is likely that a hardliner, perhaps with ties to the IRGC and certainly with opposition to Israel, is the most likely to take his place.
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‘Auschwitz’ is a hit Iranian protest anthem, part of a music genre rebelling against official antisemitism
Last month, well-known Iranian singer Mehdi Yarrahi released a song titled “Auschwitz,” about the regime’s brutal crackdown on protesters earlier this winter, which estimates suggest killed between 7,000 and 30,000 people over the course of a few days. The song quickly gained traction online, drawing around 10 million views on the singer’s Instagram account.
The choice of Auschwitz as a historical touchstone was not accidental: it is a direct answer to the Iranian regime’s persistent mockery and denial of the Holocaust, and a point of identification for Iranians who may see an echo of the atrocities committed by the Nazis in their own government’s brutality.
Yarrahi, who lives in Iran, released “Auschwitz” after reports emerged of thousands of Iranian protesters being gunned down in the streets for protesting the regime. The song compares their fate to that of people who endured the Nazi death camps. Its opening line declares: “I come from Auschwitz, of night transfers. I come from a killing field of youth.” The music video accompanying the song features footage of protestors being beaten by regime forces in the streets, as well as photographs of those who were killed.
Yarrahi knows the price one can pay for making anti-regime music. In March 2025, he received 74 lashes as a part of his sentencing for the release of his song “Rousarieto” (“Your Headscarf”), which criticized the regime’s requirement that women cover their hair and dress modestly.
The lyricist behind “Auschwitz,” Hossein Shanbehzadeh, has also faced the regime’s wrath. In 2024, he was sentenced to 12 years in prison after he commented with a single dot in response to a post on X from the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei — a reply that received more likes than Khamenei’s original post. Iranian authorities accused him of being an Israeli spy and of spreading anti-regime propaganda. While Shanbehzadeh languishes in prison, through Auschwitz’s lyrics, his words have now been heard by millions both inside and outside Iran.
The Holocaust metaphor in “Auschwitz” is especially subversive because it invokes a history the Iranian regime refuses to recognize — just as it refuses to acknowledge its own brutality. Many high-ranking members of the Iranian regime have publicly denied, minimized, or questioned the Holocaust, including former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who was killed on the first day of the fighting on Feb. 28. The regime has also hosted state-sponsored cartoon competitions mocking the Holocaust— most recently in 2021 — and was the only country to reject a 2022 United Nations resolution condemning Holocaust denial.
By comparing the regime’s violence against protesters to Nazi brutality — atrocities that Iranian leaders do not acknowledge — Yarrahi’s song challenges both political repression and the antisemitic narratives promoted by the state that have made it a global pariah.
The soundtrack to the revolution
In Iran, where culture is steeped in poetry, protest music has become a central part of the anti-regime movement.
An Iranian activist who was arrested and jailed for his involvement in the protest movement told the Forward, “These songs push people forward. They give you the energy to keep going.” Now living in the United States, he said the music also connects diaspora Iranians to the movement back home. “When we get together with friends in the community, we play these songs,” he said. “We start talking, and the music is playing in the background.”
Music streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music are difficult to access in Iran because of payment sanctions and bans. While protest songs are censored on social media, many Iranians download music using VPNs through Telegram — an encrypted messaging app that has 45 million Iranian users despite being banned — as well as other websites. Many Iranian singers have their own Telegram channels where they share their music.
During the 2022 Women, Life, Freedom protests, the song “Baraye” (“For the Sake Of”) went viral and became an anthem for demonstrators mobilizing against the regime. It garnered 40 million views in its first two days of being released and later won a Grammy.
The singer Shervin Hajipour wrote the lyrics based on responses from Iranians on X to a simple question: “What are you protesting for?” One line references the regime’s “meaningless slogans” — “Death to America” and “Death to Israel.”
According to Thamar E. Gindin, a research fellow at Haifa University’s Ezri Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Research, music has been a meaningful part of the protest movement. “Baraye,” particularly, was sung “from balconies and windows when they didn’t want to go out to the streets and be killed. They sang it at the end of ceremonies.” She compared it to the way many Israelis and other Jews sing “Hatikvah,” as an expression of collective hope.
Polling suggests that Iranian public opinion diverges from official rhetoric.
One survey from last September found that 69% of Iranians believe their country should stop calling for the destruction of Israel. When respondents were asked about their views of foreign countries, the United States received the highest favorability rating, with 53% expressing a positive view. Israel ranked second. A 2014 survey conducted by the Anti-Defamation League found that Iranians held the lowest levels of antisemitic attitudes in the Middle East and North Africa outside Israel, despite decades of state-sponsored antisemitic narratives.
Invoking Iran’s pluralistic past
For many Iranians, protest music has become a way to reclaim their national identity. While the regime defines itself through external struggle with Israel and the West, many protestors prefer to define Iran through its culture and history. One figure frequently invoked in protest discourse and music is Cyrus the Great.
King Cyrus, the founder of the Achaemenid Empire, created one of the largest empires of the ancient world. After conquering Babylon in 539 BCE, he issued a decree allowing exiled peoples — including Jews taken captive by the Babylonians — to return to their homelands. In the Bible, he is remembered for permitting Jews to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple.
According to the activist, “Cyrus to Iranians is like the Founding Fathers to Americans,” adding: “Cyrus is a symbol of peace among nations, and also a person who respects human rights and your beliefs regardless of who you are.” He is viewed as particularly “important for what he did for the Jewish people” and other minorities, which, for many anti-regime Iranians, represents an Iran rooted in human rights.
London-based Iranian artist Amin Big A’s 2018 song “Be Name Iran” (“In the Name of Iran”) channels this sentiment. The song gained massive popularity, especially among the Iranian diaspora, during the 2022 protest movement in Iran and has since been widely shared on social media alongside videos of the current protests. The song opens with a tribute to Cyrus: “In the name of Cyrus, that King of Kings — the one who taught us to be good to our friends and companions.”
Iranians invoke Cyrus, he said, to remind themselves and the world of that history. They want to “signal to the world, especially to non-Iranians,” that “if you want to understand how Iranians think, you can look at our history.” For protestors, it is a way to demonstrate that “the current regime in Iran is not representative of Iranians.”
Another song, “Dictator,” released in January by Iranian artists Shaayn and Moonshid during the height of the protests, contrasts Iran’s current authoritarian system with the nation’s ancient past. “It’s basically saying: we had Cyrus, and Cyrus was not a dictator,” said the activist. “Our history is not all about dictators.” One line in the song reads, contrasting Cyrus with a Turkish conqueror: “One gives freedom to the people, another kills and oppresses…. One becomes like Cyrus the Great, another becomes like Timur.”
Over the years, several anti-regime protests have been held at Cyrus’ tomb in Iran. In response, the regime has restricted access to the site and deployed security forces to discourage protestors from gathering there.
According to Beni Sabti, an Iran expert from the Institute for National Security Studies, Cyrus’ pluralistic legacy makes him recognized as “the best King that Iranians had. It’s another reason to love Jews, or to re-love them,” he said, adding: “They don’t believe the state’s propaganda.”
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War with Iran puts the US-Israel alliance at grave risk
The Iran war is strategically sound yet politically unsupported — an unstable foundation for a gamble that could reshape the Middle East. That creates danger for Israel, which needs the support of an American public that is rapidly drifting away.
For decades, the country’s greatest strategic asset has not been its military technology or intelligence capabilities — spectacular as these are — but rather the political, diplomatic and military backing of the United States. That relationship has not been merely transactional. It was supposed to rest on shared values and deep public support across the American political spectrum.
If that support erodes or disappears, Israel’s strategic environment will fundamentally change. To be blunt: it will not be able to arm its military. This creates a paradox. A campaign that has so far demonstrated extraordinary value for the Jewish state also stands a risk of fundamentally weakening it.
An alliance at its strongest
The conflict has showcased the depth of the current U.S.–Israel alliance. To many observers, and critically to Israel’s enemies, the operation has underscored not only Israel’s capabilities but also the reality that it stands alongside the world’s most powerful state.
The strikes have projected deep into Iranian territory, revealed astonishing intelligence penetration, and destroyed or degraded key threats. Israel’s enemies across the region have already been weakened by previous rounds of fighting since Oct. 7, and the current operation has reinforced the impression that Israel can reach its adversaries wherever they operate.
Moreover, Iran’s regime has managed to isolate itself to the point where most Arab countries are in effect on the side of Israel and the U.S. That projection — of an unbreakable and strong alliance – may ultimately be the most important strategic element of this war.
But therein lies the rub.
The political foundations of American support for Israel are eroding, which means the very element that currently strengthens Israel’s deterrence — American participation — may also be the one most at risk.
A just war, unjustified
Americans do not understand why their country is at war.
A Reuters/Ipsos survey conducted at the start of the conflict found only 27% of Americans supported the U.S. action, while 43% opposed it. Other surveys show similar results, with roughly six in ten Americans against the military intervention.
In modern American history that is highly unusual. Most wars begin with a “rally around the flag” moment when public support surges. Even conflicts that later became controversial — from Afghanistan to Iraq — initially enjoyed majority backing.
This one did not — in part because the case for it has not been made clearly to the public.
That error is compounded by years of polarization in American politics; declining trust in institutions and leadership; and the record of President Donald Trump, who has spent years spreading conspiracy theories and demonstrating a remarkable indifference to factual truth. It is no exaggeration to say that many Americans do not believe a word he says – which is perhaps unprecedented.
When a president with that record launches a war, at least half the country assumes the worst. Even if the strategic logic is sound, the credibility deficit remains.
The tragedy is that the war is, in fact, eminently justifiable. The Islamic Republic has long since forfeited the moral legitimacy that normally shields states from outside force. It brutally suppresses its own population, jailing and killing protesters, policing women’s bodies, and crushing dissent with an apparatus of repression. Its foreign policy is not defensive but revolutionary. Through proxy militias it has destabilized Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen, as well as the Palestinian areas, in some cases for decades.
The regime has pursued nuclear weapons through a series of transparent machinations, deceptions and brinkmanship. Negotiations have repeatedly been used as delaying tactics while enrichment continued. Any deal that relieved sanctions would not simply reduce tensions; it would also inject new resources into a system dedicated both to repression at home and aggression abroad — one that is despised by the vast majority of its own people, as murderous dictatorships inevitably will be.
There is a doctrine in international law known as the Responsibility to Protect — the principle that when a state systematically brutalizes its own population, the international community may have the right, even the obligation, to act. By that standard, the Iranian regime has been skating on thin ice for years.
But with this clear rationale left uncommunicated, the politically dangerous perception has spread that the U.S. was reacting to Israel rather than acting on its own strategic judgment.
A perilous future
If Americans come to believe that Israel caused a costly war that they did not support in the first place, the backlash could be severe.
For centuries, one of the most persistent antisemitic tropes has been the accusation that Jews manipulate powerful states into fighting wars on their behalf. The suggestion that Israel can pull the U.S. into conflict feeds directly into that mythology. Once such perceptions take hold, they can be extremely difficult to reverse.
Even people who reject antisemitism outright can absorb a softer version of the same idea: that American interests are being subordinated to Israeli ones. In a political environment already marked by growing skepticism toward Israel, that perception risks deepening the erosion of support that has been underway for years.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio seemed to inadvertently feed such notions by suggesting in recent days that the U.S. had to attack Iran because Israel was going to do so “anyway,” and then America would have been a target. It was a short path from that to conspiracy theorists like Tucker Carlson blaming Chabad for the war.
A future Democratic president, facing a base that appears to have abandoned Israel, may feel far less obligation to defend it diplomatically or militarily. Even a Republican successor could prove unreliable if the party continues its drift toward isolationism.
That likelihood is compounded by studies showing that a large part of the U.S. Jewish community itself no longer backs Zionism. That process is driven by Israel’s own policies, including the West Bank occupation and the deadly brutality of the war in Gaza.
So the very war that is showcasing the best the U.S.-Israel alliance has to offer is also at risk of fundamentally damaging that partnership. Particularly if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — the rightful object of much American ire — manipulates the Iran campaign into an electoral victory this year, the alliance’s greatest success could also be its undoing.
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Report: Iran’s New Military Plan Is Regime Survival Through Regional Escalation
Members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) attend an IRGC ground forces military drill in the Aras area, East Azerbaijan province, Iran, Oct. 17, 2022. Photo: IRGC/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS
i24 News – After last year’s devastating conflict with the United States and Israel, Iranian leaders have reportedly adopted a major strategic shift aimed at expanding the war across the Middle East to secure the regime’s survival, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Previously, Iran responded to foreign strikes with limited, targeted reprisals. The new doctrine abandons that approach, aiming instead to escalate the conflict regionally, particularly against Gulf Arab states and critical economic infrastructure. The goal is to disrupt the global economy and pressure Washington into shortening the war.
This decision followed the twelve-day war with Israel in June 2025, during which Israeli and US strikes eliminated senior Iranian military leaders, destroyed key air defense systems, and severely damaged nuclear facilities. In response, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei—before his elimination early in the current conflict—activated a strategy designed to maintain continuity even if top commanders were neutralized.
Central to this approach is the so-called “mosaic defense” doctrine: a decentralized military structure in which the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) operates through multiple regional command centers. Each center can conduct operations independently, allowing local commanders to continue fighting even if national leadership is incapacitated. This makes the military apparatus more resilient to targeted strikes.
Analysts cited by the Wall Street Journal suggest that Tehran’s calculation is to make the conflict costly enough for all parties to force the US and its allies into a diplomatic resolution.
However, the plan carries enormous risks. By escalating attacks on regional states and international economic interests, Iran could provoke a broader coalition against itself. Despite prior military losses, Iranian forces retain the capability to launch drone and missile strikes, maintaining their influence over the ongoing conflict.
For Iranian leaders, the immediate priority remains unchanged: the survival of the regime, even if it requires a major regional escalation.